I'm not sure where the function that you are using is coming from since I can't find it, but the drop pod function that is used in the HotS Library spawns a special creep unit and not your generic tumor, so maybe your function uses the same unit.

Animations (for both weapons and abilities) are played via actor events.

Animations play for already existing weapons because of an actor event that looks something like "Weapon.*.Start" or "Weapon.GaussRifle.Start" with the message "AnimationPlay Attack" or something like that. If you want it to start for your ability you have to create a new event for when that ability is used and send the same action that plays the attack animation.

The actor event would look something like "Ability.YourAbility.SourceCastStart -> Animation Play Attack". You probably also want to add some other events that handle the animation correctly when other stuff happens, for example "UnitMovementUpdate.*.Walk -> AnimationClear Attack" so the animation cancels when the unit starts to move.

This Frame Element as far as I know is used for animated images to determine the proportions of the separate images (and how many separate images are contained within the Texture). Do NineSlice textures have to be set up in a similar way, just that they always consist of 9 separate images?

Great contest :) Disappointing for people not eligible to participate though...

@Tya
See subsection "Judging".
From all entries Blizzard will put up a selection on their site for vote. Every Battle.net Account can then vote once for a map, after that process Blizzard will select 3 of the top 5 entries as they see fit and give them the top spots.
I could imagine that if you submit multiple entries that would be worth getting into the vote they will only select one of them in the preselection process, since it would be weird if a single person would get multiple Top 3 spots. But that's just my speculation, they don't have any official rules about multiple entries as far as I see it.

While I don't agree on all of Tya's opinions, I think he has a very good point in that we all as a community should be supportive of what Starcraft 2 provides rather than dwell in overglorified nostalgia about WC3. There are tons of opportunities to get create amazing content with the tools we have, but a majority of the stuff I read on the forum (outside of people asking for specific help/helping or showing off their work) is pretty unjustified negativity towards SC2 in one way or another and focussing on what we don't have instead of what we have.

I wasn't a fan of the Arcade and Bnet 2.0 in the last 3 years, but I have to admit that the changes they implemented in the last year or so are pretty huge. They even improved the latency BIG times in the last patch (at least for EU, can't talk about NA), which makes custom maps like Hivekeeper or other maps which rely a lot on a nice custom made UI and responsive controls so much more enjoyable. While there are still problems in creating a deep gameplay experience for players because of the lack of custom named lobbies that can establish rules before the games starts, I think the Arcade overall is already better than the WC3 Custom Map Lobby could ever hope to be.

Now if Blizzard creates some sort of custom tag system that allows each host to tag their lobby with appropriate tags (Dota would have "apem", "wtfmode" etc. as tags for example) I think the list of things that makes the SC2 Arcade interface inferior to the WC3 one would be almost non-existant and it would allow a lot more maps with gameplay depth to rise to the top. It would also help already existing deep communities like Star Battles for example to gain a lot more attention and following.

Bumping this, does anyone know of a way to get rid of the small loading time until the loading bars show up? Preloading the images in the "Preload Info..." menu doesn't seem to work.

I was told in IRC you could set up your own references/suffixes to choose in the Game UI Data, but I only see one reference in the data and a loading bar consists of at least 2 different image assets, so I really have no clue how I would have to set that up in the "Assets.txt".

Since one of the later patches the main weapon effect and everything linked to it doesn't show up in the Object Explorer, that's the issue here. Hopefully gets fixed in the next patch, until then you have to manually find the action actor of the marine and the sound data you need.

I don't know if it is actually functional for the "Animation Playing" term, but if you go into XML mode you can add a "!" in front of the term like you would for a condition in logic and it works for some terms. I'm not sure if it works for every term though. There is no way to do that in the GUI, you have to open the XML view and do it manually.